40 Days and 40 Nights Erotic Fiction Contest, Second Place Winner, 2009
The first words I ever heard from Ilan Kauffman’s beautiful lips were, “Od lo avda tikvateynu.” Roughly, “Our ancient hope will never die.” Sung, not spoken. The chorus of the Israeli national anthem.
The Reform temple that my mom and sister attend begins every Shabbat service with “Hatikvah.” I’d gotten used to this. Rarely, as I was seen inside Temple Beth-El, I was still used to the fact that the choir was led by Barb Rubinstein, a sixty-three-year-old woman who sang in an operatic alto voice.
That is, until my niece’s bat mitzvah.
As my sister’s only child prepared for the day she would become a woman, she called me frequently. Mostly to ask what I was wearing. Occasionally to tell me what Ilan wore to choir practice. Ilan, whose name means “an oak tree.” Who had a broad stripe of freckles across his nose, smoked cigarettes, and once picked tangerines in Haifa. I assumed Sophie was talking about a twelve-year-old boy.
At the bat mitzvah, Sophie and the thirteen other girls who made up the girls’ choir stood. The congregation of Temple Beth-El rose to its feet as the music swelled. But where Barb Rubinstein should have stood, there instead stood Ilan Kauffman. Twenty-five years old, my mother filled me in later. Just finished his master’s degree. The girls’ choir sang the first verse, and he joined them on the chorus. Even with the whole congregation singing, including me, it wasn’t hard to pick out Chazen Ilan’s voice.
Rich. Powerful. But not deep.
Light as feathers, as air.
Light, but not pure.
There was a raw, wounded edge to Ilan’s drifting feather of a voice. A scar. The sound of broken glass. Kristallnacht a capella.
I knew, then, that I had a sacred calling. From then on, I was to devote my whole heart, my whole mind, and my entire body to making Ilan sing to me the way he sang to Adonai. My own personal tsiklen zich.
After the ceremony, we all walked to a downtown hotel and had a party in the ballroom. I caught Ilan on a cigarette break on the loading dock. Words were exchanged. I don’t know what I said to him, or if it made any sense at all. He looked at me with those jeweled, deep brown eyes and said, “Shut up.”
From his lips, the words were as welcome as, “Let’s fly to Paris.”
He followed them up by backing me against the dusty brick wall of the hotel loading dock and kissing me. His hands held my arms, pinning me against the wall, leaving me no choice but surrender. I needed no other choice. I closed my eyes and tasted his mouth. His last cigarette, the one he’d stubbed out on the brick wall just before he crushed me up against it. The sweet red wine he’d been drinking at the party. I had never liked the taste of cigarettes until that erev Shabbat. I wondered how long I could breathe in, taking in the taste of Ilan’s wine and cigarettes, his aftershave, the new-cotton smell of Sophie’s bat mitzvah souvenir t-shirt, his sweat, and the night air, without breathing out. I lost track of how long.
When he turned and went back inside, the taste of that kiss lingered.
But his voice. Ancient Hebrew meets ‘70s soul meets barbed wire. That was what I truly couldn’t get out of my head. I wanted to touch and taste and kiss him again, but I needed to hear his voice. I needed to make him say my name. I needed to make his voice bend at the knees, fall on the floor, and crawl to me.
In the shower, I thought about it so hard, I swear I heard Ilan’s voice bouncing off the walls. Calling me. Teasing me. Moaning my name ecstatically: Mark, Mark, Mark!
“Yes, Ilan,” I said back. I said it out loud, alone in the shower. “Tell me what you want, Ilan, and I’ll give it to you.”
“Shut up,” he would answer, just as he had on the loading dock. “Shut up, kiss me. Kiss me there. Lower.” A litany of requests, of commands. I kept each of his commandments to the letter, performing my duties with joy. In my best dreams, the last command was always the same: Fuck me. Said in Ilan’s raw-soul-shredded, glass-temple, cantor voice, it made me lose control each time. Hashchatat zera was never this easy.
For three days, every moment that I wasn’t eating, sleeping, or at work was spent fantasizing about Ilan Kauffman. The kiss. His taste, his smell. But most of all, the sound of his voice. Saturday, Sunday, Monday evening. Tuesday evening, when I got home from work, there was a message on my answering machine.
“Uh, Mark Rothstein?” Ilan said my name with some uncertainty. But still, Ilan said my name, and not just in my head this time. I felt the rush of blood away from my brain. “Sophie gave me your number.” My niece is a good girl. “So, I was wondering . . . do you like Italian food? Maybe we could go to La Trattoria. Any night but Friday– you know, Shabbat services. Call me back.” Followed by the seven most beautifully pronounced digits I’d ever heard. It wasn’t Fuck me, but my cock didn’t seem to know the difference.
I called him back. We made plans for Thursday.
Ilan was already at the table when I met him at La Trattoria. He had his head down, reading the menu, and didn’t see me. He wore a black sweater and matching kippah (the same traditional black kippah he’d worn to the bat mitzvah), and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses that I hadn’t seen before. He looked up, saw me, and pushed the glasses up the bridge of his nose.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Ilan said, “but I ordered us a bottle of wine. A Beaujolais.”
“I like Beaujolais,” I said, rather stupidly, as I hung my jacket on the back of my chair. I sat down. He poured me a glass. He continued to study the menu, and I assumed the responsibility for making conversation. “So, Ilan, you can sing.” He nodded. “Do you play an instrument?”
“Just your traditional rock combo,” he said. “Guitar, bass, drums. I play some piano, too. My Classical education is lacking; I’ve never learned a piece by a single German composer. No Bach, no Beethoven. But you name any Irving Berlin tune, and I can bang it out for you.”
“For the first time in my life, I want to be an Irving Berlin tune,” I said, unthinkingly.
Ilan laughed. I looked up and saw the server, a dark-haired woman in her early twenties. She wore her hair in pigtails. She brought us a basket of bread. “Are you ready to order?” she asked us. I took a sip of my Beaujolais.
“I’ll have the spinach tortellini,” Ilan said. “Hold the garlic, please.”
Hold the garlic may be three of the sweetest words in the English language, only because they foreshadow kissing of the deep, tonguing, gasping-for-breath variety.
“And for you, sir?” the girl asked. She had an amused smile on her face, as if she thought Ilan and I were cute.
I ordered my favorite dish, “Cioppino.”
The girl went away, and I said to Ilan, “So, how many of the ladies of Temple Beth-El have offered to set you up with their daughters?”
He took off his glasses, folded them, and put them in his pocket. “None,” he said. “Mark, everyone knows I’m gay. I’ve been out since I was fourteen.”
“The congregation knows?” I asked, thinking of all the blue-haired old ladies at the temple. “And they don’t . . .”
“Throw stones?” We both laughed. “Not typically. Not very large stones, anyway. The congregation is very cool.” He took a piece of bread.
“Did Rav Sarah tell you that she and I went to high school together?”
“As a matter of fact, she did,” Ilan said. “She also mentioned a kiss.”
I hid behind my wine glass as I answered. “We were kids. I was confused. And it was nothing like the kiss that you and I shared on the loading dock at Sophie’s bat mitzvah.”
“Ah.”
I wanted him to say more. “Let’s do that again,” for example. Or, “I hope you suck dick as well as you kiss, because you blew my mind.” Anything, anything other than just, “Ah.” But he didn’t. Unbending as the tree for which he was named, Ilan steered the conversation far, far from each of the places I wanted it to go. Such as Ilan, bending over, unlike the tree for which he was named. Yet sporting wood, like the tree for which he was named.
“Your niece is really cool,” he said. I nodded and listened politely as he described all of Sophie’s fine qualities. How he was thinking about girls at a time like this, a time when I should have been reaching under the table to explore whether he was sensitive in that soft spot behind the knee, I’ll never know.
I do know that when the food came, the server with the pigtails set Ilan’s tortellini in front of him, and Ilan said a brief prayer thanking Adonai for it. She set the cioppino in front of me, and I didn’t have a place to put it, because my foot was already in my mouth.
“Would you like a taste?” I asked Ilan, like the biggest fool ever. Of the cioppino, that is. Not of my foot.
“No, thanks,” he said. I stared over at him, taking a sip of wine– wine he’d no doubt prayed over before I got there– and eating what was perhaps the only meatless dish on the menu, I realized my mistake.
“Of course not,” I said. “Why would you eat shellfish? In butter?” I laughed, because it was all I could do not to cry. My lovely bowl of seafood soup was suddenly a bowl of traif.
“I don’t worry to much about kashrut,” Ilan said with surprising gentleness. “But I am a vegetarian.” He took a bite of his spinach tortellini, and I could tell from his face that he liked it. “How about a taste of this?”
I barely nodded my head, and he leaned forward to reach across the table with a forkful of spinach- and cheese-stuffed pasta for me. As he fed me the tortellini, his thumb touched my lower lip. From that gentle pressure, I thought I would burst into song.
Ilan sat back in his chair, obviously pleased with my reaction. “Pretty good, huh?”
“Almost makes me want to become a vegetarian myself,” I said. I finished my glass of wine, and Ilan poured me another. “If only I wasn’t such a devoted meat-eater.”
He laughed, leaned back in his chair, and said, “Your sister told me you live in Marble Hill, in those apartments that still have the alabaster front steps.”
“Yes,” I said, liking the direction the conversation was going in now. I told him all about my apartment, pausing here and there to take hearty bites of my traif. I ate the whole thing, practically licking the bowl clean. I wanted to lick the bowl clean in front of Ilan, just to demonstrate my technique. Good manners prevented me.
At the next appearance of our pigtailed server, I requested two shots of the house whiskey. Not because I like gawd-awful drugstore rotgut, but because that stuff could strip paint. It kills the taste of everything, even cioppino. And I wouldn’t want Ilan to taste the offending flesh of living creatures, mixed with butter, on my tongue. Not to mention the garlic.
“L’chayim,” Ilan said as our shot glasses clinked.
“As-salaam Alaikum,” I said. We tossed back the first shot, and just in case it didn’t take effect, a second one. Followed by the remains of the Beaujolais.
Pigtails called us a cab. Ilan, I’d discovered, lived much nearer La Trattoria than me, so I figured I’d let him sit on the curbside. I got in the back seat and scooted over to the driver’s side. Ilan made himself so comfortable, his knee almost touched mine. I was just thinking of this new opportunity to discover if he was ticklish behind the knee when the cab driver said, “Where’re you guys going?”
“Marble Hill,” Ilan said, without hesitation. He looked over at me, a very subtle smile on those beautiful Beaujolais-stained lips. His dark eyes sparkled in the bad light, and suddenly my mouth felt very dry.
While the cab stopped at a busy intersection, I leaned across the back seat, very close to Ilan, as if I had something important to whisper in his ear. I kissed him behind his ear. At the same time, I ran my hand up the inside of his thigh.
Just as quickly, I pulled away, retreating to my corner of the cab. The driver eyed us in the rear-view window.
In his corner, Ilan hummed softly. The tune was a distinctively Middle Eastern one. How eagerly I hoped to hear that sound, louder, closer, and punctuated by sighs of, “Oh, yes, Mark. Suck it. Just like that.”
We got to my building, where Ilan did not bother to look at my alabaster steps. He marched me straight to my elevator. When we were alone in it, I moved in to finish where I’d left off in the cab.
Ilan stepped back.
“Did I do something wrong?” I asked. “Is it the ciopinno?”
He shook his head. “Not at all. I like you, Mark. It’s just that I worry about the ethics of this.”
I heard what he said after “I like you, Mark,” though it was hard to concentrate on it while staring at that yummy-looking stripe of freckles across the bridge of his nose. “Ethics,” I repeated.
“Yes,” Ilan said as the elevator stopped. The doors opened, and we stepped into the hall. “What about negiyah?”
Negiyah– the rule forbidding physical contact between unmarried persons. A man and a woman, typically. “I’m not sure that negiyah applies to us,” I said as I fumbled for my keys. “And even if it did, Ilan, negiyah went out the window with that kiss on the loading dock.”
Ilan made himself at home in my apartment. He took off his sweater and hung it on the back of a dining room chair. He stepped in front of the bay window, where light flooded in from the full moon. I joined him there; he turned and looked at me over his shoulder.
“What about commitment?” he said, his desert-sandpaper voice sounding almost boyish in my too-quiet apartment.
I put my hand on his shoulder. He didn’t object, so I brought my body closer. Our hips touched. “Ilan,” I said, “I want to commit myself to you all night. Then maybe I’ll make you a little breakfast, take a break, and commit myself to you again in the morning.”
He laughed. The gorgeous, throaty, full-bodied sound was as welcome as strong coffee after a hard sleep. “What’s for breakfast?” he said. “Not bacon and eggs, surely.”
I smiled. “For you, I could make some oatmeal.”
He gave me a half-roll of the eyes, a gesture startlingly reminiscent of my niece. “Oatmeal,” he said. “That’s as close as it gets to commitment with you?”
My answer was this: I moved my hand from his shoulder to the top button of his shirt. He let me work on the button, and then the next one.
On our first meeting, he’d prepared me for the reality of his tattoo. It still shocked me. The Star of David, faintly yellow against the sun-kissed olive of his bare skin, and the word inside, “JUDE,” were a tribute to Ilan’s Holocaust survivor grandparents. I stared.
“It’s still there,” Ilan said, lifting my chin so that I looked him in the eye. “It will always be there.”
I closed my eyes, the only way I could imagine to deal with that tattoo. I leaned in and kissed Ilan’s chest. I kissed the ink-stained flesh over his beating heart, feeling his heartbeat with my lips. I kissed my way down one of the legs of the star. He gasped as my lips reached his nipple.
I listened intently as he drew in that deep breath. I prayed that as he breathed out, his song would come out, too.
Instead, I felt the deep rumble in his chest as he said, “Should we go to the couch, Mark?”
I responded with an, “uh-huh,” one I could barely hear myself over the furious roar of desire in me.
Ilan threw his shirt over the back of the couch. I liked the way his clothes were getting strewn around my apartment. And soon I’d have his pants off.
He made himself comfortable on the couch, and I followed him. I approached this holy man with all the reverence he was due. I sat beside him in awed silence as he brought his lips to mine at a torturously slow pace. That first touch was a creeping shadow, a bare whisper. Yet that whisper stirred in me the same thrill I had felt the moment I first heard Ilan’s song. Here was the fulfillment of my ancient hope.
We kissed, and I reached up to touch his hair. Ilan’s black hair was short–too short to curl, long enough that I could see how it would– and wiry. I stroked behind his ear, then slid my hand down the back of his neck. I felt him shiver, a delightful sensation. Then he untucked my shirt.
I let him help me out of my jacket. As he unbuttoned my shirt, his eyes never left mine. He bit his lip, a small gesture that I found irresistible. I wanted my turn to bite that lip next. Ilan ran his fingers over my chest approvingly, lingering over the sensitive skin under my navel. This time, it was me who shivered.
Ilan seemed to like my reaction. Yet he remained still, a situation I would have to do my best to remedy.
I took up where I’d left off: fingers tracing their way down the back of his neck, tongue finding tongue. Then, as he graciously allowed me to shift my weight onto him, I kissed his throat.
I thought then that I heard the hum, a sort of purring sound. To my disappointment, the sound came from my own throat. Ilan was silent.
Perhaps, I thought, I was moving too fast. With the utmost care, I made sure to kiss every inch of his throat before progressing down his chest. Right side, this time, to avoid the unsettling artwork.
At last, Ilan had something to say. “Where are you going, faigeleh?”
Not exactly the tsiklen zich of my dreams; still, there was something forbidden and sexy about gutter Yiddish from Ilan’s lips. If I could get him to say shtup es in toches I might lose it.
“You tell me, Ilan,” I said, looking up into his eyes. And I hung there, watching the rhythmic rise and fall of his chest, hanging on his answer.
His answer was a timid, “Don’t know, but keep going.”
Permission, I took it, to continue my slow trail of kisses down his chest. As I reached his ribs, he gave me an encouraging sigh. And another, as my tongue traced its way around his navel. My kisses dipped into the waist band of his black pants, and suddenly, his hands were there. He unbuttoned the one black button and reached for the zipper.
“Let me,” I said. I unzipped his pants and pulled them low over his hips, along with the white briefs underneath. And underneath that, I found the most beautiful part of Ilan’s beautiful body. I stared at Ilan’s cock in awed silence, just for a moment, before touching the tip of my tongue to the underside of its head.
I waited and watched his reaction. Ilan’s head rocked back into the couch cushion. His eyes shut. His lips were drawn back into a smile of deep bliss.
He made no sound. No sigh. No “Hallelujah.” No song, certainly. His breathing became a little heavier, maybe. That was all.
With a fierce determination to get the music out of him, I ran my tongue up and down the shaft of his cock. After that gentle warm-up, I began my full-on assault, taking nearly all of him into my mouth at once. He made a soft, choked “uh” sound at this, hardly the effect I was going for. So I didn’t let up. I tongued him relentlessly, driving him deeper and deeper into my throat until I thought that I would hurt myself.
But even as I felt his muscles tighten, even as I knew he was close to the edge, Ilan refused to give me what I wanted. The only sound he made was an occasional grunt. A pleased grunt, but still. Instead of the deep satisfaction that Ilan’s pleasure should have given me, I felt mounting disappointment.
Stupidly, I said so.
“God in heaven, Ilan,” I said. “How am I supposed to know if I’m doing this right if you won’t make a sound?”
He opened his eyes. “You’re doing it right,” he said. “Believe me.”
“I believe you,” I said. “But I want to hear it from your lips, Ilan.” I should have stopped there. I didn’t. “Remember in the taxi, how I kissed you and you started to hum? I want that.”
Ilan sat up. He looked at me, looking deep into my eyes, and I swore that he was looking into my soul. “You want me to sing,” he said. “Is that what you’re saying, Mark? That you want me to sing like I do in the temple?” From the expression on his face, he was utterly disgusted with the idea.
Worse, he lost his erection and stuffed it back in his pants.
“Wait,” I said. “I didn’t say that. I think you have the wrong idea.”
“Do I?” he said. He’d turned around and reached for his shirt. He paused long enough to say, “Look me in the eyes and tell me that’s not what you were thinking. Because if you were . . . blasphemy is the word that comes to mind, Mark. But it’s not even that. What you are doing is – it’s idolatry!”
He waited for my answer. I rose, and he stood so that we looked each other directly in the eyes. “From the moment I met you,” I began, “at Sophie’s bat mitzvah, I’ve been in love. With your voice. You’re a beautiful person, Ilan, and not just on the outside. Forgive me. Your song is a part of you, Ilan, and I wanted you to give yourself to me, whole. Including the music.”
Ilan looked away, shook his head, and turned back toward me. The next word that issued from his lips was the sweetest of all. “Okay,” he said. He reached out and put his hand on the back of my neck. “Okay. I’m going to go home now, Mark. Thank you for a lovely evening.”
“It was my pleasure,” I said.
He put his shirt on, missing the bottom button and buttoning the rest entirely incorrectly. I didn’t correct him. As he went to leave, he said, “Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow night.”
“Tomorrow night is Friday,” I said. “Erev Shabbat.”
“I know,” he said. He walked out the door and pulled it shut behind him.
Shit, I thought. Fifteen years of carefully cultivated secularism . . . could I throw all of that out the door for the chazen? I sunk into the couch, defeated, only to find that the scent of Ilan lingered.
My fantasies of Ilan lingered as well. I looked down at my hands. Alone again, with hashchatat zera. But maybe tomorrow. . .?
Originally published April 2009